


Yours

by distr0



Category: Kill la Kill
Genre: Emotional Infidelity, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 01:22:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8870245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/distr0/pseuds/distr0
Summary: Where it takes a while.





	

**Author's Note:**

> There are a lot of blanks to fill in this one, but hopefully it isn't so vague that it doesn't make sense, or seems out of character. Take the context in stride + enjoy. 
> 
> (This can be read as a response to the argument that Satsuki and Ryuko would somehow end up distanced post-finale).

The steady beat of wipers nodding back and forth over the windshield. Her head spinning as she let her eyes drag along in time. Mouth so dry her tongue stuck to her palate. 

She’d spotted the car through the curtain of rain and pulled herself into the passenger side. The leather of the seat dampened thanks to the water she dragged in on her clothes. It was 5:04 a.m. and the static of a dead station came through on the radio.

It killed her, to hear her say nothing.

“Thanks.” She dropped the word out like a buoy in the middle of the ocean. It’d been so long, she’d slipped her moorings and drifted too far off to rein them back to dock. The rain rushed down against her window.

She leaned back against the headrest, closed her eyes, and breathed deeply through her nose. Asphalt and copper and something briny pushed out warm through the air vents. A hand came to stroke her wetted hair away from her neck.

Rows of suctioned marks drew a trail from the corner of her jaw that disappeared beneath the collar of her shirt. Fingertips slightly too cold for comfort pressed into each of the welts as though to count them. She shifted away, batting at her hand with a short click of her tongue.

“Leave it alone.”

She regretted the instant she’d decided to dial her number from the sparse list of contacts in her phone. Resting on the edge of a stranger’s bed as she forced her heel into her shoe without unlacing it.

She’d drowned out the woman’s name between mixed drinks and loud music because she’d had no need for it. Her height was right and her hair was long, and in the dark it was easy to fill the blanks. But her smell had been all wrong.

A floral aroma bathed the inside of the car thanks to the thermos sitting half-empty in the cup holder between them. Musky sweet. She steeped in it along with the white noise coming in from the radio. Darjeeling, was it?

“I’m surprised you called,” she said finally. She was throwing her a rope and she made sure to tether herself to it. “I’m glad you did.” It dragged and burned against her hands.

How very like her, to pretend it meant nothing to either of them. She refused to anchor down the lie she hoped to stretch between them.

“It won’t happen again.”

She meant it. Not just the early-morning call netted by stale spirits, but the stranger’s perfume imbibed by her skin, too. It had shackled her around the throat when a name left her lips—same as the one lost between the walls of her room most nights. She felt sick.

Red, right, return.

Traffic lights hanging starboard side shone green as she drove her home.

 

* * *

 

She stepped out onto the deck and the leaves slotted between its slates crumpled up underfoot. Yellow, orange, brown, losing color fast.

The night was humid but the air cold enough to freshen her lungs. Fingers pinched a cigarette buried in the pocket of her leather jacket. She found her lighter in the other, and struck the wheel with her thumb a couple times before drawing in a breath. The muscles in her jaw unclenched and the gnawing at the back of her head eased as she let it out again.

When the glass door slid open behind her, it unmuted all the voices bubbling in the house. She didn’t turn from where she leaned against the railing to acknowledge her presence, only listened as she closed the door again and bridged the distance between them. Heels of her boots hitting wood with a hollowed sound.

“Come back inside,” she said. She stood off to the side, just shy of the railing, arms crossed over her chest to keep warm.

She was halfway through her cigarette and took a long drag without a word of response. There was an earthy smell stuck to the air that calmed her nerves. Indoors, she’d been stifled.

“I didn’t know you were smoking again,” she said after enough time passed.

“I didn’t know you were dating anyone.” Something had gone and crawled down her shirt and stung her there, left her pained and swollen. “Guess we’re all caught up now.”

The way everyone’s eyes had seemed to find her when it slipped through conversational cracks still made her skin crawl. She’d been upset, but not surprised at not knowing—not with how scarcely they seemed to talk lately. Clearly not something she should have felt entitled to.

“You never asked,” she said. “And the situation’s a bit of an exception… You know there are things I have an easier time with.”

She huffed out something meant to be a laugh, but it turned ugly as soon as her breath misted into a cloud in front of her. The tip of her cigarette found the railing and she ground down the butt against the wood, drawing steaks of black into the grain. She couldn’t tell what she wanted from her. A suggestion hung in the air that she answer the justification with her blessing. Wasn’t that normal?

A force of hand.

“Exceptions, huh?” Biting as the air hitting her lungs. “Didn’t know you made any of those.”

Their eyes met for the first time since she’d joined her outside. Something in the way she looked at her made her dig her heels down and shove hard, head to head.

“D’you leave the lights on?” No pause to allow her an answer. “D’you say each other’s names?”

She was close to violating something unspoken, something buried in the soil between them since they’d been teenagers. Feeling a fool when met with silence, she laughed the same fake laugh to fill the space.

It had never crossed her mind, that one day they might slip rings over their fingers, two discrete marks over the calendar. Still, the notion etched at the back of her skull that they’d be alone together for an eternity refused to erode under the breath of fall.

“Fucking figures,” she said, sadder than she’d meant to.

She heard her turn back inside after a moment of standing still, perhaps a substitute for an apology, leaving her by the railing with a snuffed out cigarette between her fingers. Pressing cold leather over her top lip as she wiped her nose with the cuff of her sleeve.

The wind picked up. Her eyes stung and watered.

 

* * *

 

Steel heated by the car’s engine warmed her thighs where she sat over the hood. Dots of light delineating the city’s skyline twinkled almost the same size as the stars overhead. Spring nights carried the promise of summer on the smell of the world blooming back to life.

They were a part of each other again, even if only once a week, when the skies were dark, in places where no one else existed. Satsuki perched herself on the edge of the hood, knees bent to rest against the metal bumper. Hands splayed out at her sides to take in the heat.

“Update.”

It was a question. The same question they started with by tradition for Satsuki to trace whatever road she pleased with.

“My new meds finally started working, I don’t know if I told you.”

“That’s great.”

“Honestly. It finally feels like I’m getting somewhere.”

“CBT still good?”

She nodded behind the edge of the borrowed red scarf wrapped around her neck. If the night had been cooler, her breath would have curled back to condense against its threads. Her threads.

But it was pleasant out and she was bundled just enough.

“I told him that we do this every week. He says it’s good for me to be taking time away from everything, even if it’s only a little bit at once.”

“Sometimes it’s all those small things that end up addin’ up.”

The tires of her car had left their fingerprints along the dirt road leading up this hill. Beating down the path with every trip they made. Grooves against the earth, muddied in places and no longer cracked by winter, took shape beneath them.

“You’re the only one I ever talk about these things to,” she confessed.

“Yeah?”

There was a person she went home to every night, and there was another she stole away with once a week to feel the world afresh. Empty promises. She shared every piece of her heart with the second, who made it swell and ache so completely her breath seized in her chest. Affection climbing, and climbing, until it choked her around the head, left her dizzied. A reaction drawn out simply by being.  

The flick of flint brought a flame to life. The wheel rolled beneath Ryuko’s thumb and she held it still as she drew against it. Puffing steadily before holding it out to share.

“Just a little.”

But she rescinded the offer with a pull back in her direction when Satsuki’s pinched fingers rested against her own 

“C’mere.”

Scooting across the hood of the car to brush knees. Her chest expanded, and held there for a beat. Ryuko leaned forward. Exhaling softly. Satsuki stole her breath away on clouds of smoke sealed by their lips touching together. Falling just so. An accidental honesty.

It was spring. An aftertaste of tealeaves spilt onto her mouth in the short time it took to separate. Kindling an old, persisting heat aflame. Satsuki coughed their mistake away, and tamed the fire down again.

The night air cooled the engine bellow them. They found their way into the car before it robbed them of the warmth pressed against their legs.

 

* * *

 

Silence held her hand as she dipped her foot into the water she’d drawn for the bath. A tub with wide ledges, porcelain white framed by wooden panels. The only light in the room came from the window just above, and the few candles within arm’s reach. Rich scented wax.

The surface, milky white with soaps and oils, rose as she lowered herself into the water. Almost too hot for comfort. Steam fogged the mirrors and the window and it dotted moisture against her skin. She breathed deeply to enjoy the flow of it cleaning out her lungs. When her eyes opened, Satsuki’s were on her for only a second before she touched her shoulder lightly, to turn her around.

The sound of a bottle snapping open, and then of water stirred. The lathered hand towel moved against her back in soothing circles, then across her arms, scrubbing away dirt and grime and sweat.

She was always inexplicably filthy after their walks through the forest. Little scratches marred her hands and arms, where she’d pushed through branches. Some things never changed.

More so when they found themselves here. Time and place fell stagnantly around them as they drew away from the world, in a small house recessed along the mountainside. It was always quiet here.

“Who’s waitin’ for you at home?” Ryuko had asked her before they’d agreed to pack their bags.

“No one.”

No one had been waiting there for quite some time. An empty apartment felt more a home than one with lies lining the walls in picture frames, all weapons built for distance. She grew tired of pushing.

With these lulls in time she allowed herself to pull.

The sun setting against the trees behind the house threw warm beams of light in through the window, thinning and all but fading as the wet cloth Satsuki used against her skin rose out from the water once again. She folded it in half, and then in quarters, and with it brushed her shoulders first. She followed the curve of her spine, then, down from the base of her neck until Ryuko arched against the touch, now running lower as her hand dipped beneath the surface. The towel floated there, ballooning out in bubbles of trapped air, and drifted aside as soon as she let it go.

Her hands sank down and swam into the space bellow Ryuko’s belly as though guided by a current. Two shadows pulled through water too opaque to see through, to rest between her legs. Wrapping around her hips to tug her closer, until their bodies were flush. She felt where one wetness bled into the next, and savored the way she shivered when she slipped into her, deeper, until she couldn’t tell the warmth of her body from the warmth surrounding it.

Quiet but for the gentle sloshing of water hitting the edge of the bathtub, rippling out in wavelets with the subtle swaying of her hand. Quiet but for the sound of Ryuko’s breathing, growing heavy and thick like the steam wrapped around them both.

She held her still against her chest, with one hand between her breasts, to keep her from floating away. Pressing their thighs together. Movements so minute they kept her there well past the sun had set. But the candles flickered still, and when Ryuko jerked softly in her arms, no more than a few spasmodic tremors, the motion dispelled the glimmers the light cast against the water’s surface. Breaking silence, finally, with the faintest cry. High and strangled but not quite kept at bay.

Satsuki had nuzzled her way into her hair and she pressed her lips there, just behind her ear, as she felt her heart calm again against her hand.

The darkness in the room left Ryuko blind when she opened her eyes, and the sound of her pulse in her ears, deaf. Satsuki’s fingers moving out and away, tracing her side until they left the water, muted her. The smell of soaps and candles burned her nose.

And then one hand brushed away her hair and the little threads of it clung to moisture over fingers.

“Lay back, I’ll wash your hair.”

She rested her head in Satsuki’s lap, hair webbing out in tendrils to tickle her thighs. Suds cleared away every time her hands combed through to massage her scalp.

Their eyes met and they drowned there for a time, with her fingers caressing the shells of her ears and tugging gently at her earlobes, while she reached back to run her touch along her arms. Only when the candles had snuffed themselves out, and the pads of their fingers had grown wrinkled in the water, did she lean down to kiss her, almost demure, to taste their tongues brushing together.

She always tested the waters this way, as though a dam between them would burst and send the world aflood if she dove in before dipping her feet. Shy in the beginnings of a wet kiss, and less so when they laid into bed one room over. Dampening pillows with their hair.

Even when tears ran down to join the mess, the silence held. They spoke through twinned hands, and skin pressed close, and clinging to each other all through the night. Better so than to inundate everything with words.

A hush slept between them.

 

* * *

 

An old apartment—once a house, now split in floors and rooms to fit a few lives more—invited her up its carpeted staircase. She found a room a ways up with a grimy screen stuck up against a single glass pane. A grey sky’s monochrome light streaming through.

It was raining, probably, though she couldn’t make out droplets in the air with the dust clinging between the mesh over the window. Mud lined the bottom of the trough of space separating this city building from the next.

She caught her, then, staring back across the way through her own darkened windowpane, and recognition hit as soon their eyes met. Like seeing someone sorely missed for the first time in years, someone she’d resigned herself to never seeing again. Never meeting in the first place.

With her palms flat on the glass she pushed out against the window, through the filthy screen beneath it until her body fell to the air. Feet hitting the mud below. Sinking into it. She’d never felt so much joy as when Satsuki stood there with her.

A warm embrace. No care for the weather, the dreary light, the coming storm. Her world was all color as they spun on axes around each other, and the sludge beneath their feet dirtied their shoes; it caked onto the bottom of their pants. Never in her life had she felt so happy. Smiling stupid.

“I never thought I’d see you.”

Again. For the first time.

“You’ve grown,” Satsuki told her. A hand fell over her head and rested there, comparing their heights. Nonsensical, baseless. She held no predating knowledge of her. Ryuko shook her head.

The building opposite her own, the one Satsuki had come from, altogether did not belong here. Off to its side, the mouth of a driveway, and further still, a bared enclosure holding a handful of sheep. She held out her hand for her sister to take, and once their fingers linked, pulled her the rest of the way across the alley, falling back through the wall and into the apartment building.

They found the inside of a house instead. Spacious and gaudily decorated and well furnished. So pristine it felt criminal to track in dirt. Portraits holding faces familiar in every way but for small unplaceable distortions lined the walls. A woman just short of her mother stared warmly through her from one framed canvas.

A different universe, surely.

Running in circles around the house, she lost track of Satsuki at one time or another. She’d misplaced something. Her shoes. Taken off to keep from dragging footprints over white floors. She dug up half fragments of snapshots in her memory—places they might have been left and forgotten. Tracking back time, searching for more of the same before it all faded away. She could feel herself slipping.

When she reached a room upstairs—unmistakably hers, though she’d never seen or spent a night in it in her life—she found Satsuki there, with the boots short of being slipped over her feet. Ryuko watched as she dug her heel in deeper.

“You still wear these?”

Logic crumbled in the way she remembered passing through the walls, and moving through the house, without really moving at all. She’d bought those shoes only a few years ago, in the same world she felt her consciousness pulling her awake.

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess I do.”

 

* * *

 

The napkin came away with spots of grease after she wiped her hand, the one she’d used to pick through the fries on her plate. Crumpled by her grip, she let it rest by her untouched fork before reaching for the glass of water in front of her. Leaving a semicircle print against its rim with her bottom lip. She smelled of leather and motor oil. She smelled like she’d been on the road for days without stopping.

“Your hair looks good,” Satsuki told her. In the stillness of the diner, over a song playing from the jukebox sitting across the room, a 40 record model. The needle skipped and scratched backwards against the grooves at least once every couple of tracks.

“Thanks. Might let it grow back out, though.”

Her hands were clean—she’d left for the bathroom to pick away at the dirt living beneath her fingernails after they’d walked in together—but scratched up in thin lines here and there. Gripping motorbike handles had left calluses over her palms.

Nine months gone.

“How long since you’ve been alone?”

“A while.”

“Since you last spoke to someone?”

“I talk to people all the time.” Ryuko tore a good chunk from her burger to masticate between words.

“Strangers don’t count.”

“Acquaintances?”

A huff, and then Ryuko’s gentle laughter spread through the room before trailing away without an echo. Satsuki softened at the sound. Here was a person never worth staying upset at. Dots of ketchup stained the corners of her mouth, red as the streak in her hair, red as the bike parked by a lamppost outside—she could see it through the window from where they sat, just over the menus tented against the napkin holder.

She’d rolled in with hardly an hour to spare.

“You actually made it.” Satsuki had only been half surprised. At her watch pointing to 11:08. At Ryuko poking her head through her car window—hiding her timidity behind a familiar pointy-toothed smile.

“C’mon, you know I always make good on my word.” That they’d always end this day together, for all the years they had left.

Nine months without connection, with only an hour to spare, and still her joy at sitting face to face blew fears out of the water. Never worth it. The fussy clinking and rolling of machinery backgrounded her thoughts as the jukebox sifted through its selection of discs.

“So, you broke up, then?” she asked, surprisingly level.

Ryuko shrugged her shoulders as she finished chewing one last mouthful of her burger, and then took her thumb deliberately between her lips to clean off the juice that had run there.

“No room on my bike for someone who doesn’t like my ane.”

No need to ask why that was the case—there had been those who hadn’t liked Ryuko, either.

“Makes for a rather limited selection, no?”

“My ane likes herself plenty. Surely that counts for somethin’.”

Satsuki’s eyes shifted to the pattern printed onto the tabletop and she hummed, feigning composure though her cheeks flushed. At the suggestion, at the nod to her narcissism, at either or both. “For more than just ‘something’.”

When Ryuko stood, she stood with her, and slipped on her jacket as she watched her flip through her wallet for a few bills to leave on the table. And then as she turned to wave at the waitress through the kitchen window before pushing open the door, and holding it behind her. A little bell chimed as Satsuki passed beneath it.

One decade younger, and Ryuko might have looked something of a bosozoku. With her modified bike and the color in her hair and even half of the way she dressed. She walked to her motorcycle and settled against it, started the engine, and paused short of kicking it into gear.

“If you’d do me the honor.” She nodded her head back, towards the small space left just behind her on the seat. “Just a short ride. We’ll come back for your car right after.”

“No, we can head straight to the apartment.” Standing onto the foot peg with one hand over Ryuko’s shoulder, Satsuki swung her leg over the bike and sat close against her. “And get the car tomorrow. It’s not far.”

She wrapped her arms around her waist, letting her hands slide up beneath her jacket to come closer to her skin. Buried her nose against her hair. It was shorter than she’d ever known it. A vague aftertaste of exhaust masked Ryuko’s usual smell.

“Oi, it’s prolly kinda dirty, you know.”

Satsuki hummed though, and nuzzled against the back of her head. “I’ll have to throw you in the shower first thing when we get back, then.”

“Won’t say no to that.”

The weight of her foot against the lever shifted it into first, and her hand releasing the clutch rolled them out slowly towards the road. Satsuki held her as close as comfort allowed. The leather of her jacket pressed against her chest. Her hair tickled her nose when she leaned forward. The warmth of her body held in their heat even as cool air whipped around them.

“D’you mind if we take the long way home?”

Stopped at an empty intersection, she turned her head to speak to her. Lips brushed against her cheek, and painted a flush there as they traced the distance to the corner of her lips.

“Might as well.”


End file.
